


as if all the stars

by seventeencrows



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen, and then there's victoire fourier, brief mention of blood and violence, there's those kids who know exactly what they want to do when they grow up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-02
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2019-01-28 10:37:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12604704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventeencrows/pseuds/seventeencrows
Summary: Victoire Fourier is seven years old when she knows she’s going to be the brightest astrophysicist the world has ever seen.Victoire Fourier is twenty-eight when she has to prove it.





	as if all the stars

**Author's Note:**

> i deleted ten one-shots and two multi-chapter fics in the past two days and this missed the cut solely because it was already finished, so here’s this
> 
> title from Saint Exupéry’s _The Little Prince:_ “In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night—you, only you, will have stars that can laugh!”

Victoire Fourier sees her first supernova when she is seven years old.

It’s through a dinky telescope in a neighbor’s yard, set up to watch the meteor shower that Goddard Futuristics had been predicting for weeks. She knocks into it clambering up the kitchen chair parked on the wet grass, swings it wide on its stand by accident—but she tells people later that she swung it around on purpose, that she knew, somehow, there was something better to see on the other horizon. It’s still there when she looks away from the eyepiece, a too-bright spot that lingers behind her eyelids long after it fades from the sky days after. She learns later that it was an unprecedented event. With all eyes on the shower, almost no one else saw it.

(Victoire writes about it in a school contest once, when she’s ten, to be part of the first group of children all around the world to send letters to a crew in space. A Mr. Carter writes back. She still has the letter somewhere, folded into one of her journals.)

Victoire is—she’s quaint, is the word; English mother and French father, pleasant house in the Belgian countryside and boarding school and a war one thousand years in the making behind closed doors on weekends and holidays. That’s how she likes to think about it, like a page from her history books and not something personal, not something between two people; everyone knows England and France have never gotten along. It’s so quiet, she discovers, when her home is an armistice, a tentative ceasefire for her sake—there are appearances to keep up. The Fourier family is absolutely fine; doting mother, loving father, a battleground for a daughter—mines planted and abandoned under a mortal shell heart and an artillery ribcage under the good china, something pristine to be polished and admired.

(The great artisans gloss the cracks, after all; you’d never know until it shattered.)

Victoire Fourier has freckles across her face like a blast radius and she sows seeds where there is only salt and she holds _still,_ listens for the click and rattle of air in her lungs like the pin on a grenade and waits for the explosion. This will be a garden if only she doesn’t breathe too deep.

 

Victoire Fourier breaks her arm when she is eight, from a misguided attempt to fly after her father reads her _The Little Prince,_ but only up to the snake, to just before the fall. (Nearly two decades later, she takes it with her to a little world of her own, and she reads it all the way to the end).

Victoire breaks someone else’s arm when she is fifteen; she’s three cities away on a scraped-together train ticket with the pocket money her mother sends, and there’s a boy across the ring who looks like he could pound her into stardust. There’ll be a mark in a file with her name on it when this is all said and done, a nun with a red pen and a scowl to make the baby Jesus weep when she slinks back into class tomorrow with bruises like a constellation and a silver medal in her pocket, but she’s been chasing that flash behind her eyes for years now. She sees it under competition lights and in the inky reflection of her fourth cup of coffee at three in the morning before her paper is due, in every teacher who calls her _bright_ like they know what that kind of sacrifice even means. Victoire knows that burning that bright means burning up just as fast, consuming yourself until there is nothing left but legacy and she calls this a controlled demolition, a guided dig, a hopscotch game that threatens to blow if she jumps too far outside the lines. But boarding school, but _earth,_ they press in on her too tight, crowding her into the corner and prodding at the cracks she’s not supposed to have. They hook under her collarbones like anchors, like gravity—Victoire skips her graduation to watch live feeds of the latest rocket launch, turns her eyes starward and salts and burns the ground behind her.

(The best doctors her mother hired tell her she has anxiety and an inferiority complex that could stretch to the moon and back. Victoire thinks they’re probably right, but there’s something about charting a trajectory—a star’s, her fist’s, she’s not picky—that closes that gap just a little more. Besides, Goddard Futuristics just debuted the prototype of their new VX engine series and by god, Victoire swears she’s going to know one of those like the back of her hand someday.)

 

Victoire Fourier is maybe a little bit in love with her commanding officer.

Captain Isabel _“Fuck’s sake, don’t call me Commander, it kills me a little inside”_ Lovelace is the single most terrifying, brash, unspeakably stubborn person Victoire has ever met. She may be carrying an armory in the hollows of her collarbones and the gaps between her ribs but Lovelace is a fire brilliantly aware of just how fiercely she burns, one that has something to consume, is set to its task and devours everything it can reach if only to do as it has been asked.

Twelve years of Catholic school and praying to the gods of time and caffeine and epsom salts and Victoire is still never prepared for how Lovelace feels like a higher power when she’s pressed against her; North Star stable, a holy thing that does not burn. There’s a hand on her shoulder before spacewalks and arms linked together on the way to the mess (and fingers in her hair, braiding it when her own hands are shaking too hard, when she’s the best astrophysicist on the station because she’s the only one they have left)—it feels like, for once, someone else is holding the timer. Someone else is minding the countdown and making sure she doesn’t blow.  

Hui is a constant crackle, static on her skin that makes her hair stand on end, makes the air in her lungs buzz. She tastes ozone, tastes _almost_ in the tick-tick-ticking of her landmine belly when they spark off each other _—bet you spacewalk duty I can calculate that faster than you and Rhea both; you wouldn’t know a red dwarf from a baboon’s ass if it turned blue and sang you a lullaby; you brought The Little Prince? to a space station? god, I love you—_

Hui laughs when she tells him she can box, but only once, on day two of training at Canaveral. (It’s hard to laugh with a busted lip, Victoire knows.) Their communications officer calls it insubordination. Their new captain calls it family bonding. A woman in a sharp suit and sharper heels who looks nothing like a nun jots it down in Victoire’s file. Hui makes her sign her handiwork in marker across his cheek and takes her out for dinner.

But Goddard is just the place for people like them, these folk with gunpowder in their guts and flint for teeth. No one here tells Victoire she’s bright like it’s something she doesn’t already know—besides, a Mr. Cutter tells her while a pretty young girl with a head full of curls and what appears to be a switchblade tucked into her bra presses a chai latte into her hands, they already know she’s the best. They want to see what she can do _better._

 

Victoire Fourier watches bone shift under her skin when she flexes her fingers all in a row. Musician’s fingers, her mother had said once, pressing her palms to her daughter’s, and she sees it now, the blood drying on her knuckles like so much rosin. She’d always thought it was too fragile a thing for someone with bullets for fingertips, hasn’t so much as looked at the cello propped in the corner of her bedroom in more than a decade.

But there’s a set of piano key bruises across Selberg’s face now, a pentatonic scale from jaw to cheekbone, a symphony ringing in both their ears from the blow. She has no answer when Lovelace asks her why. Not one she can really give her, anyway, under the lash and crackle of Lovelace’s desperation and the weight of Hui’s legacy so bright it still burns them both, of the letters she’s tucked into her journals to deliver. Selberg is still lurking here somewhere in this mausoleum; she knows there’s something wrong with him, something twisted on the inside. Not rotten, just _empty._

But this is just another flash, another star on her personal horizon; she followed one all the way here and she’ll follow this one home, with or without them. Selberg has the captain’s ear, thinks he’s _won_ but that’s the thing about minefields, about playing games with someone who can play them better—sometimes you lose. Sometimes, you go out with a bang. Lovelace trusts him and she trusts Lovelace, but not this time. Not in this.

Victoire Fourier grew up in a warzone of clever words and empty promises.

She knows a turncoat when she sees one.

 

Victoire Fourier gets slam-dunk drunk with some new hire named Jacobi after they finally pass their zero-g training (the rest of her crew passed with gold stars weeks ago; she’s still no better at flying than she was when she was eight). It’s her first ever drink and, as he tells her, his last. His higher power has spoken; it’s time for him to sober up, get ship-shape. Victoire sees handprints around his wrists and a trail of bruises across the hollow of his throat and knows how another person can feel like a higher power when you lay under them.

But he’s buying, and she leaves at the end of the week, and tequila tastes a lot like how she imagines rocket fuel would. Mr. Cutter told her all about the mission in as much detail as she could have ever wanted, enough for the ticking in her ears to fade and the pipe-bomb countdown in her chest to slow, pause, restart.

Mr. Cutter talks about her letter as if he’s read it himself.

Maybe, he tells her, she’ll get to see something _really_ spectacular.

**Author's Note:**

> you can find me @rahayn on tumblr


End file.
